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The Magic Skin by Honoré de Balzac
page 24 of 343 (06%)
moral acid within them?

"What is there in that box?" he inquired, as he reached a large closet
--final triumph of human skill, originality, wealth, and splendor, in
which there hung a large, square mahogany coffer, suspended from a
nail by a silver chain.

"Ah, _monsieur_ keeps the key of it," said the stout assistant
mysteriously. "If you wish to see the portrait, I will gladly venture
to tell him."

"Venture!" said the young man; "then is your master a prince?"

"I don't know what he is," the other answered. Equally astonished,
each looked for a moment at the other. Then construing the stranger's
silence as an order, the apprentice left him alone in the closet.

Have you never launched into the immensity of time and space as you
read the geological writings of Cuvier? Carried by his fancy, have you
hung as if suspended by a magician's wand over the illimitable abyss
of the past? When the fossil bones of animals belonging to
civilizations before the Flood are turned up in bed after bed and
layer upon layer of the quarries of Montmartre or among the schists of
the Ural range, the soul receives with dismay a glimpse of millions of
peoples forgotten by feeble human memory and unrecognized by permanent
divine tradition, peoples whose ashes cover our globe with two feet of
earth that yields bread to us and flowers.

Is not Cuvier the great poet of our era? Byron has given admirable
expression to certain moral conflicts, but our immortal naturalist has
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